Ancient cloth which lay at bottom of Perthshire loch for thousands of years goes on display
A rare piece of fabric that lay buried under silt at the bottom of a Perthshire loch for nearly 2500 years has gone on display. It was found in 1979 when an Iron Age loch dwelling house, the Oakbank Crannog, was excavated on Loch Tay. The woven piece of cloth is believed to be one of the oldest of its kind in Britain and dates back to the early to middle part of the Iron Age. It is now on show for the first time - within a climate controlled cabinet – at The Scottish Crannog Centre's Iron Age village, visitor centre and museum, near Kenmore. The textile had previously been thought too fragile to display, but it will be a permanent exhibit at the centre following a painstaking stabilisation and conservation process, funded by Museums Galleries Scotland. Experimental archaeologist and volunteer at the centre Maureen Kerr said: 'The exciting thing is that there's nowhere else in Scotland, and very few places in the rest of the UK, that has a textile of this size and age. 'The weave on this fine textile is called a 2/1 twill which is really unusual for the time in southern Britain and northern Europe as most twill weaves were 2/2. 'This sheds considerable light on the technologies society had in the Iron Age. 'Twill weaves, which this textile is part of, is a dense, flexible fabric, very similar in appearance to our modern denim weave. It has been made, we think, on a two-beam loom, or a warp-weighted loom. 'This, combined with the fact that there are the remnants of a possible hem indicating that it could have been part of a piece of clothing, makes it a rare and special discovery.' Crannogs – dwelling houses built on stilts or stone over water – usually had a bridge connecting them to the shore. Very few exist outside of Scotland and Ireland. The first crannogs in Scotland were built on lochs from Neolithic times. The Scottish Crannog Centre director Mike Benson commented: 'We are absolutely thrilled to be able to invite the public to come and see this amazing find. 'This piece would have been made by a whole community, from the shearing of the sheep, to the processing and dyeing of the wool to the weaving of the textile. 'Our Centre today is very much about community and the one thing that unites all of us is our common humanity through the ages.' The 'Oakbank Textile,' has been analysed by University of Glasgow archaeologists who have radiocarbon dated the material to between 480 - 390 BC. University of Glasgow senior lecturer in archaeology Dr Susanna Harris said: 'There are very few early textiles of this date and we think this is the first one of this type, of 2/1 twill, in Scotland. Wool was such an important material in Scotland it's been exciting to analyse this piece. 'It's great that the Scottish Crannog Centre has taken this step. It's really important finds like this go on display. It may be a small piece of textile but it tells us a lot about the heritage of Scottish textiles.'
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